I really had to do some creative financial stuff last year.
It was the year of shrinking our expenses and spending much more frugally.
However, we were able to do this all while working and schooling from the safety of our air conditioning at home. The pandemic was of course the reason for our financial straits. Well, straits isn’t exactly an accurate description given that we still had jobs. Had we not been able to work from home in our air conditioning, we would have definitely been in financial straits. Still, our spending had to shrink significantly. We were able to save a lot on entertainment since there wasn’t any. There wasn’t any leaving the HVAC security of home for a meal, a movie, a trip or anything of that variety. Saving that money certainly helped. We also simply tightened the belt in other ways as well. But mid summer, we had a bit of a problem that caused us to consider a dumb idea. We noticed that the HVAC cooling just wasn’t keeping up. The heat pump was running all of the time and just couldn’t catch up. I thought I could fix it myself with some help from online videos. Actually, I had myself pretty convinced that I could recharge the refrigerant. Now how I got so confident in my skills or HVAC diagnosis ability, that’s another question. Thankfully for me, my wife shut that down pretty quickly and effectively. She knew better than to trust our expensive HVAC equipment to a guy who watched an online video about HVAC. She called the HVAC company and we spent the money on a proper HVAC repair.